TALIBAN BAN ON GROWING OPIUM POPPIES FADES

A highly successful ban by the Taliban on the growing of opium poppies in
Afghanistan, which had been by far the biggest source of opium in the
world, has begun to unravel as the United States presses its war there,
U.S. and U.N. officials say.

Reports from Afghanistan received last week by the United Nations show that
farmers are planting or preparing to plant opium poppies in at least two
key growing areas of the country. Recent U.S. intelligence reports also
suggest that the year-old ban may be eroding as the military assault
continues, U.S. officials said.

"They may have told people they can plant, they may tell people nothing and
allow them to plant, or there may be enough chaos with the war that it
won't matter what the Taliban says," said the State Department's senior
official for international narcotics issues, R. Rand Beers. "We had a
situation that showed promise that is now headed in absolutely the wrong
direction."

Even a wholesale collapse of the ban might not have an immediate impact on
the availability and price of opium and heroin, one of its derivatives, in
illegal drug markets around the world. A continued flow of opium from
stockpiles inside Afghanistan has so far kept the prices of those drugs
stable in Europe, and officials expect those reserves to last for perhaps
another year.

But after paying relatively little attention to the problem in recent
years, U.S. officials are now closely focused on Afghanistan's drug trade,
saying that taxes on farmers and traders have become a crucial source of
revenue for the Taliban and that drug money may be used to finance
terrorist activities.

"The urgency has increased," the administrator of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, Asa Hutchinson, said in an interview.

The challenge that Washington now faces is, in some part, of its own
making. In the 1980s opium production flourished in Afghanistan with the
involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the
Central Intelligence Agency.

In the 1990s, as the country's poppy fields expanded, the United States
refused to deal with the Taliban government and focused its drug control
efforts in other regions that were thought to be supplying greater amounts
of drugs to U.S. markets.

"It's something that just wasn't on our radar screen," a senior U.S.
official said of Afghanistan's drug trade. "We were worried about other
things going on in Afghanistan, and we didn't want to deal with the Taliban."

While some officials suggest that U.S. military forces might now try to
target caches of opium stored around Afghanistan, others acknowledge
privately that they have scant information about where those caches might be.

Although opium has been produced in Afghanistan for centuries, it began to
boom after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Soviet troops demolished much of
the country's irrigation system, leaving opium poppies, which need little
water, as one of the few viable cash crops.

Often, officials said, the convoys of donkeys and trucks that smuggled arms
to the mujahedeen returned to Pakistan with raw opium, sometimes with the
assent of the Pakistani or U.S. intelligence officerswho supported the
resistance.